I like Sarah Polley. I like Adrien Brody. Fine actors, both.
I tend to enjoy the sci-fi-horror hybrid when it’s executed properly. Alien. The Fly. Ample opportunity to blend gruesome elements with intelligent storytelling. A new way to explore primal fears.
Vincenzo Natali, director of Splice also directed Cube. Not a bad sci-fi-horror flick. Not great, by any means, but not bad.
And yet, despite these combined elements, I have zero faith that I will enjoy Splice. Here’s why…
It looks like a movie where we’re expected to sympathize with stupid smart people who irresponsibly use their idiotic intelligence for pointlessly creative purposes.
I’m hardly anti-science. In fact I’m absolutely counting on some sort of nano-tech medical breakthrough to come about before I turn 50 that will allow me to age backwards and live forever. I’m all about science, but in a horror fiction format the scientist either needs to have a decent reason for executing his / her experiment that will inevitably go awry, or he / she needs to be the villain, not the protagonist.
I mentioned The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum’s scientist was working on an instant teleportation device. Worthy enough cause. Event Horizon falls short of being a good movie, but it has its moments, and the premise of faster-than-light travel resulting in breaching the barrier between the universe as we know it and some sort of cosmic hell is undeniably intriguing. And that initial experiment that literally sends a vessel to hell and back? Worthy enough cause. Even the callous female scientist in Deep Blue Sea who was ultimately treated as a minor antagonist was specifically trying to cure Alzheimer’s.
With Splice, however, you seem to have an experiment almost specifically designed to go awry. How could splicing the genetic material of various animals with human DNA to create an ass-faced baby that grows up to look like the offspring of a tryst between Megan Fox and one of the “newcomers” from Alien Nation possibly benefit mankind, or do anything but go horribly wrong?
Doesn't she look precious?
“Oh no, our lab-grown humanoid genetic hybrid that has exhibited unpredictable evolutionary traits and potentially dangerous characteristics from the jump has developed into a winged, chimeric killing machine. Who could have foreseen anything like this?”
Maybe the film will prove me wrong, but I have significant doubts. Vague allusions to “medical breakthroughs” aren’t going to cut it. As it stands, I expect to be wishing death upon dear Mr. Brody and Mrs. Polley no more than ten minutes into the film. Hell, the trailers alone have me feeling indifferent to whether or not their characters live or die. That can’t be right…
